Transforming Shakespearean Performance A Business Plan

The Dark Lady Players [email protected]

BUSINESS PLAN 2009/2010 A PLAN FOR TRANSFORMING SHAKESPEAREAN PERFORMANCE 1.Introduction In summer 2008, the investigative journalist Michael Posner wrote a 15 page article on our work which appeared as the cover story in the Canadian arts magazine The Queen’s Quarterly. He called it ’Rethinking Shakespeare’ and described the beginning of an initiative that is transforming how the plays are understood and performed. 2.The Need We Address Theaters today perform the surface level of the Shakespearean plays, focusing on the plot, the ability of the actors to simulate real emotions, the set design, lighting etc. But directors, actors, and theater critics alike are almost completely unaware that these plays contain multiple layers of meaning, in particular deep religious allegories that provide the underlying meaning of the play---which the author intended that audiences should decipher. Because modern theater staff are not educated in deciphering those allegories themselves, let alone skilled in creating kinds of performance that will reveal them to the audience, and because audiences do not know what they are missing, Shakespeare performances today communicate little of the depth of the plays. As theater critic Mike Daisey noted in his essay ‘Empty Spaces’ many theaters are “mashing up Shakespeare until it is a thin lifeless paste that any reasonable person would reject as disgusting.” It is one reason why attendance at Shakespeare productions is in long-term decline. The mission of the Dark Lady Players is to help change this. 3.Project Description We are a small theater company in New York City, now in our third year of operation. Our performances of the Shakespearean plays have significant implications both for the performing arts and for Jewish culture, because we; •

reveal the underlying Jewish religious allegories in the plays, and

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employ a unique approach to performing them, which

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supports one of the lesser known alternative authorship theories.

The Dark Lady Players are the only theater group in the world that uses performance to help audiences rethink the underlying meanings of the Shakespearean plays in this way. The outcomes have extraordinary cultural implications.

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We are seeking funding to enable the Company to produce our allegorical Shakespearean Miscellany, and a production of Othello in 2010. Both of these will build upon the Company’s current work Shakespeare’s Three Virgin Mary Allegories, an intertextual piece about Ophelia, Desdemona and Juliet, which will have its first reading as part of ManhattanTheaterSource’s PlayGround Development Series this August, followed by a site-specific workshop production in September 2009. This document provides detail about our approach to the plays, the cultural and historical importance of our work, the reception of previous work, how our work is evaluated, the audiences we reach, our personnel and project budget. 4.Our Approach to the Plays Most Shakespeare productions aim at saying the verse beautifully, making the characters lifelike, and creating an emotionally realistic performance. They avoid illustrating the text, and often employ a visually entertaining ‘high-concept’ setting in a proscenium arch theater. Nothing could be more utterly foreign to the Elizabethan stage for which these plays were first written. It is our fundamental assumption that the performance of a Shakespearean play should not be judged by anachronistic modern criteria like the set design, the lighting, the costuming, whether actors are stars, or display realistic emotions, but by whether the performance helps the audience to comprehend its underlying allegorical meaning. That is what the Elizabethan theater did. Realism did not exist. Performances were on a thrust stage, there was minimal scenery, and acting was highly stylized and metatheatrical. Actors were required to ‘illustrate’ the text and there were manuals of oratorical gestures to enable them to do so. Only the most ignorant members of their audience would limit their attention to the plot and the “honeyed sweetness of the verse”. Any educated Elizabethan would understand that the actors were merely ‘puppets’ and would seek out the underlying allegory that the playwright was conveying. The Dark Lady Players adhere as far as possible to these Elizabethan conventions. As one cast member aptly remarked, we treat the play like an enacted three-dimensional crossword puzzle to be solved in real time---just like on the Elizabethan stage. It is our experience that this process can facilitate complex insights and startling discoveries about material which audiences thought they already knew. 5.Cultural and Historical Significance The Company’s work has global cultural significance for the following reasons: (a) Allegories: The Dark Lady Players use leading edge scholarship to demonstrate that the plays contain religious allegories which reveal meanings that are usually confined to obscure academic literature and never normally shown on-stage. These allegories are performed onstage using a mixture of Medieval and Renaissance performance techniques. Parts of them have been previously tested at the New Perspectives Theater Shakespeare Directors Workshop. (b) Authorship: The plausibility of a new solution to the authorship problem has grown in recent years. In a front-page article on April 17, 2009, the Wall Street Journal noted that 66% of the active Supreme Court Justices are no longer convinced by the evidence for Mr. Shakespeare. Meanwhile according to a 2007 survey, 17% of English professors think that the authorship is not resolved, and 5% regard this area as an “exciting opportunity” with “profound implications”.

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In particular, for many years the allusions in the plays to the Mishnah and the Talmud, as well as their use of Hebrew puns and occasional words of spoken Hebrew, have been impossible to explain within the traditional authorship model. The recently discovered Jewish nature of the allegories in the plays proves to be the decisive evidence to support an alternative authorship candidate. Our work supports one of the top authorship candidates to have been recently listed by the UK Shakespearean Authorship Trust, the feminist poet, Amelia Bassano Lanier (1569-1645). Her family were Venetian Marrano Jews of Moroccan origin, who became musicians at the Elizabethan court and subsequently played music for the theater company that performed the Shakespearean works. One of them composed most of the surviving music for the Shakespearean plays. Coming from a family described in their police records as ‘black’, Lanier was the so-called ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets, the mistress to the man in charge of the English theater, and the first woman to publish a book of original poetry Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). In addition, her ‘literary signatures’, a device used in classical literature, have been found on half a dozen of the plays. (c) Non Realistic Performance: The Dark Lady Players uniquely use an early Renaissance meta-theatrical performance style, in which the actors are presentational rhetorical figures, through which the allegory can be discerned. These productions are much more complicated to stage than usual because of their intensive use of props and because actors perform multiple additional allegorical characters and dramatize passages that are not normally dramatized. By bringing the sources on stage, in dialogue with the Shakespearean text, the audience is able to see how the playwright modified those sources, and this brings new understanding of the author’s meanings. This unique bridging of Shakespearean scholarship and theatrical performance, engages the audience in the process of solving the underlying allegories that the plays contain. For instance, a short work sample available on the Web as Youtube The Dark Lady Players - Midsummer Clip shows how the productions ‘point’ specifically to the allegorical meanings, in this instance Oberon uses a pedagogical style to demonstrate the specific identity of the ‘flower’ that Puck fetches as the Gospel (in Elizabethan England ‘flower’ could mean a book). 6.Reception of Previous Work General articles on our work have appeared in the Times of India, the London Jewish News, the Forward, Ha’aretz, Lillith, and most recently in the June/July issue of Hadassah Magazine. There has also been significant coverage in other languages especially Italian. Presentations on our work have been made at venues including the Smithsonian, the Oxfordian Shakespeare conference, the Harlem Arts Alliance, New York University, Stony Brook University, the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, the Shakespearean Authorship Trust in London, Creative New York, synagogues in Westchester and New York, and the Manhattan Jewish Community Center. The outcomes from our work are significant in changing perception. In 2008, Manhattan TheatreSource produced a three-day Shakespeare Symposium by the Dark Lady Players. The formal audience feedback surveys showed that: 87% of the audience improved their understanding of the underlying allegories in the plays, 83% improved their understanding of Shakespearean authorship issues and 70% “significantly

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increased” their interest in learning more about Shakespeare. The Dark Lady Players have done two major demonstration allegorical productions. • Our production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was demonstrated at the Smithsonian Institution as part of the Washington Shakespeare Festival in 2007 and then ran at the Abingdon Theater in NYC. An extract is available on the Web as Youtube The Dark Lady Players - Midsummer Clip. This production was the subject of a front-page story in the New Jersey Jewish News, as well as full-page articles in The Villager, the Village Voice and Jewish Week. M. George Stevenson from the New York Sun called it “a fascinating production performed with contagious zest and surprising pathos” and the New Jersey Jewish News, wrote that it had “uproariously funny moments, punctuated by scenes of violent carnage and deep, spiritual pathos.” •

Our As You Like It was staged at Manhattantheatersource and then at the Midtown International Theater Festival in 2008. A 30-minute television program on the production was screened on 4/22/2009 at 9:30 PM, on channel 34 TWC and on 4/26/2009 at 12 PM, on channel 57 TWC, and can be found on the Web under the title AS YOU LIKE IT:Interview on Manhattan Entertainment. The use of innovative techniques throughout the play led Philip Langner, director of the Theatre Guild, to call this production "the best piece of creative theatre I have seen in many years."

A 15-minute demonstration tv documentary on the work made by Mitchell Riggs, then at Stony Brook University Drama Department, was screened in 2008 on Manhattan cable and can be found on the Web in several places including Youtube The Dark Lady Discovery and has been viewed over 6,000 times. 7.Academic Reception The primary purpose of our work is to educate theater professionals and students by turning obscure academic scholarship into performance. Our change strategy is intended to make an impact on young acting professionals and theatergoers, rather than upon the slow-moving world of academia and Shakespeare scholarship. However the Dark Lady Players have been invited to give the University Lecture and workshops on last year’s productions of As You Like It at Eastern Connecticut State University in November 2009, at the invitation of Professor Ellen Brodie and Professor David Pellegrini of the drama department. Academics who have already come out in favor of the work include Professor Kelly Morgan at Fitchburg State College, a former Associate Artistic Director of the Riverside Shakespeare Company and the founder of the Mint Theater. He states that the research opens up “breathtaking new avenues” for performance and will restage the Dark Lady Players’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2009. Dr. Catherine Alexander, who is the Editor of the Cambridge Shakespeare Library and a Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, calls the work a “legitimate new area for scholarship”. A two hour debate on the research with Stratfordian professor Tom Dale Keever was recorded in April 2009 as a radio program and is available on the Tribeca Radio website. This research will hopefully have its first academic publication in a 5000 word article “Amelia Bassano Lanier; A New Paradigm for the Shakespearean Authorship” that was

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commissioned by The Oxfordian, the only journal dedicated to the authorship question. It will eventually be followed by the print publication of a 250,000 word book The Dark Lady; the Woman who wrote Shakespeare which is currently available as an E-book, and is used as a manual by the actors in the Dark Lady Players. An advance review of this book which appeared as an article ‘Rethinking Shakespeare’ in The Queen’s Quarterly in summer 2008, concluded that the case for Lanier is “as plausible as Shakespeare’s”. 8.Project Evaluation Plan Because our work is an exercise in ‘applied theater’, this project will include an outreach campaign to create a dialogue among the theater community. Our academic advisors Professors Brodie, Clarke and Morgan will be involved in designing and evaluating this process. Our desired outcomes are to have a very high impact on our theater audience’s understanding of the meaning of the plays, in the same range of 70-85% demonstrated in our work last year. For both productions in 2009-10, our success in achieving these outcomes will be evaluated by a paper based survey. This will use a Likert scale ranking to assess the contribution that the event made to each respondent’s understanding of the allegories in the plays, their understanding of the authorship issue, the impact on their future interest in learning more about Shakespeare, and their ratings of how they expect this allegorical solving to impact their creativity, imagination, and overall problem-solving capacity in the future. 9.Personnel The director of the project will be John Hudson, who is artistic director of the Dark Lady Players, an ensemble of actors, most of whom trained either at Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts or at the London Academy of Music and the Dramatic Arts. He has a M.A. with merit in Shakespeare and Theatre from The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, Stratford-Upon-Avon, a B.A. with first class honors specializing in the sociology of literature, and a M.Sc. in management from the London School of Economics. He has over 20 years experience in creating innovative business models and in project management in the communications industry. He has co-authored two books on Shakespeare, written half a dozen articles, and his radio play on the authorship question, ‘The Shakespeare Show’ was broadcast on NYC radio in June 2009. 10.Budget and Audience Although the work of the Dark Lady Players is of historical and cultural importance, and is changing how we comprehend Shakespeare’s plays, it can only be produced if it receives foundation and donor support. Because of the current funding environment, it seems unlikely we will be able to raise the funds even to do ‘Showcase’ level productions. We therefore have built our 2009/10 budget on doing festival productions such as Midtown International Theater Festival or the Planet Connections Festival. These have the lowest up-front costs in theater rental, but the theater operator takes almost all of the house revenue. We would ideally have greater resources but because our focus is different from other Shakespeare productions---we focus on enabling audiences to understand the deepest allegorical meanings of the plays---we can achieve this objective, if necessary, even with minimal resources and young, unknown, classically trained actors. Indeed our work over the last 3 years demonstrates that we can use small investments to achieve exceptional impact.

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Moreover, the performance is only a step towards creating the video and web distribution that is essential to reach a wider audience. For instance, our Shakespeare Symposium attracted perhaps 150 people, but the related video Youtube The Dark Lady Discovery is posted on the web in several places where over 6,000 people have watched it. We would anticipate similar online audience ratios for the productions covered in this document. Our work will also be posted on Scribd.com, the world’s largest publisher, where our past working papers were viewed over 3,000 times in the first month of posting. In those weeks more people read articles about our production of As You Like It, than had attended our sold out performances in 2008. Indeed our papers on the individual plays are currently some of the most viewed Shakespearean documents on Scribd.com. In addition, a 2 hour program about our work on Tribeca Internet Radio attracted 8,000 downloads, and a program on our AYLI on Manhattan CATV also attracted thousands of viewers. So although the number who will see our work live in 2010 will be small, within a year or so many more people will encounter some version of it in other media. Together these efforts will slowly begin to change the way that people perceive the plays, so that their full meaning can be understood.

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